Armed with solely a telephone and selfie stick, blogger Igor Grishin has set himself the duty of preventing corruption in his hometown past Moscow, following within the steps of imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
Grishin, 25, has leveraged his weblog to save historic buildings and native parks that will in any other case have fallen sufferer to builders in Koroloyov, a small however vital city for Russian and Soviet area historical past.
But in Russia, the place criticism of the authorities is shortly silenced, Grishin is already feeling the strain from the police.
“I like Korolyov. I used to be born right here and I would like to defend what I like,” says Grishin, strolling via the small city simply six kilometres (4 miles) exterior the Russian capital.
The city of simply over 200,000 folks is called after Sergey Korolyov, the daddy of the Soviet area programme, and homes the Russian Mission Control Centre.
Strolling via the city, Grishin factors out round two dozen multi-coloured buildings – every between two and 4 storeys excessive – that had been constructed between 1946 and 1953.
They had been as soon as residence to Soviet scientists like Sergei Kryukov, a ballistic missiles engineer, and Konstantin Bushuyev, who was concerned in sending the primary satellite tv for pc, Sputnik, to area.
But there are plans to demolish the historic district to make method for high-rise blocks – uninteresting and gray – plans that Grishin is decided battle in opposition to.
Inspired by Navalny
With his comrade-in-arms Roman Ivanov, the duo have been making an attempt to converse up in a rustic the place impartial media have lately suffered a far-reaching crackdown.
After Navalny’s arrest in January final 12 months, authorities ramped up strain on journalists, bloggers and opposition activists, with many pressured to flee overseas.
Ivanov, who labored as a journalist for over 20 years, says he was fired from a state-run tv channel final May after he began a YouTube channel referred to as “Honest Korolyov”.
“My boss referred to as me to hearth me as a result of, in accordance to him, I should not chunk the hand that feeds me,” he says sitting in a city cafe.
He tells AFP that in in the present day’s Russia: “journalism has been changed by propaganda”.
Ivanov created his channel in 2019 after becoming a member of protests in opposition to Korolyov’s former mayor, who was accused of making the most of ties to property builders.
In movies for his 5,000 subscribers, Ivanov criticises native officers pointing to electoral fraud, poor infrastructure and improvement plans that will destroy historic buildings.
The Korolyov mayor’s workplace didn’t reply to AFP’s request for remark.
Ivanov describes Navalny as a “proficient organiser” and says he respects the opposition chief’s investigations put collectively by a crew that probes the wealth of Russia’s elites in slick YouTube movies.
Russia on Tuesday added Navalny and plenty of his allies to an inventory of “terrorists and extremists”, as authorities additional clamp down on the opposition.
“In our metropolis virtually all media are financed by the administration. What we have now left is the web and social networks,” Grishin says.
Official ‘revenge’
He is the chief editor of a weblog referred to as “Official Korolyov” hosted on Russia’s common social community VKontakte.
But even web giants should not immune to state management.
Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have all been repeatedly fined for not deleting content material on the behest of Russian authorities. Apple and Google had been all pressured to take away a Navalny app from their shops.
Ivanov says their publications have mobilised locals and “saved 4 parks which might have been torn down to make room for purchasing centres”.
Another victory he cited was the ousting of mayor Alexander Khodyrev final October after he was accused of falsifying election outcomes by the impartial Novaya Gazeta newspaper.
However, the bloggers’ efforts haven’t gone unnoticed by police who got here in late October to search their properties, taking away their telephones and computer systems.
Grishin is now accused of being concerned in a battle whereas monitoring native elections and Ivanov is dealing with fees of showing pre-trial data in certainly one of his interviews.
Ivanov thinks that authorities need to “scare activists”. Grishin sees the strikes as “revenge” from the ousted former mayor.
In one other Moscow suburb, bloggers Alexander Dorogov and Yan Katelevsky – who additionally probed corruption – have been in detention since July 2020, on fees of blackmail.
Dorogov, who faces 15 years in jail, instructed AFP in court docket in Moscow final November their work was taken offline to defend officers.
“Our YouTube channel was deleted to conceal details we printed there: bribes, corruption amongst funeral corporations, police, investigators and prosecutors.” – AFP
